Magento

Quickbooks doesn’t appear to be an issue, there’s multiple ways around it. T-Hub as middleware seems to work well or you can create your own export templates.

I’ve not heard of Net Suite or Mamut but having quickly looked them up, it seems they overlap with a lot of what Magento does already. What exactly do you need that you think Magento doesn’t offer yet?

Hi J.T.

It’s a level of almost seamless integration that I was trying to achieve.

Shipping integration with (semi-)automatically printed labels using a choice of maybe 3-4 shippers barcode-scanned checking in and out of stock and Order and Returns processing. Also comprehensive reporting on stock activities and customer behaviour.

Bank reconciliations are relatively labour intensive with our current system and I was hoping to be able to integrate the batch info.

With shipping I wanted to use Royal Mail “Tracked” as one option. I see an RM extension available but it doesn’t yet have the “Tracked” service that RM provides. We do wholesale and retail so I need a bit of flexibility with multiple shipping models. I am currently talking to http://www.metapack.com to see if they will do an integration with Magento. This isn’t a cheap option but is a very good solution.

Perhaps Magento can do more than I currently realise so maybe, with a bit of extra work we don’t need the Mamut product at all… Quickbooks is a good accountinfg programme but it’s pretty weak on inventory, especially with our types of products (http://www.thewoolcompany.co.uk) blankets with multiple sizes and multiple colours. clearly all this is far better handled by Magento.

There is one other big thing I’m trying to achieve. This is, on the order page, a product availability matrix showing the two attributes of Colour and Size in a grid with a check/tick to show that particular SKU is in stock or a single digit to sh

Hi J T (again)

I’m obviously too wordy in my comments!

The last bit of the previous comment should have finfished with:
“or a single digit to show when how many weeks to wait till it’s back in stock e.g “2” weeks’ wait. The best example of this is at http://www.boden.co.uk but in addition we need to have different prices for different sizes e.g. Single, Double King Size,

~ Thanks for your interest!!
Harry

Hi Harry,

I’m extending Magento in that area too. I’m adding a way of managing suppliers, forecasting stock needs and a means to order that stock from the Supplier from the Magento back-end. Including trade value of stock and currency conversion tracking as with some products we buy in USD we have difficulties keeping our margins when the conversion changes drastically. I built that for osCommerce and need to port it over. I also aim for it to have an “ETA” feature, like Amazon but I’m less concerned with showing it to the punter, it’s more for internal use.

But it certainly is possible. I don’t know whether you have any in-house programmers and I don’t know what quotes you got for the 3rd party integration but I’ll give you my estimate, based on my experience.

I’m currently doing the official Magento developer training, that cost me about £300. That teaches me how to integrate this new Module. As I already have my osCommerce version of this functionality, luckily I don’t need to start from scratch. I expect it to take me a week to come up with a system that does everything I want. For me a week would be 6 x 10 hours. So that’s £300 for training + 60 hours work. In the UK a decent PHP developer probably costs £30 an hour, abroad maybe £15 or £20 so roughly, it would have cost me £2,100 but I’m doing it myself.

I hope that gives you an idea of whether you should even consider the 3rd party integration for that feature alone. I’d say it’s pretty doable.

BTW this i

(crappy comment system...)

BTW this isn’t an offer to do it for you, just an estimate so hopefully you’ll get an idea of costs involved.

As far as shipping goes, it’s a shame UK couriers/post don’t use APIs and XML based tracking etc. but I did get a job list import/export function going for Interlink Express. For Royal Mail we just print textual stickers to slap in the books which isn’t ideal but works OK enough for us. We do small quantities of high ticket items. I can imagine if you send 200 CDs a day, you’d want a more manageable system.

Thought you might be interested to know about another option: I have been using interprise for the last 12 months with good results (http://www.interprise.co.uk). This is a fully integrated (UK & US) ERP solution providing CRM/Inventory/Accounting etc and the good news is; a one user version is free (multi user versions are a realistic price). There is also free developer support to add plugins etc
This is quite a new accounts package so there are some limitations, but it is basically a solid fully featured package that goes well beyond sage line 50 and is probably similar to sage line 100. It is built on top of an sql database and supports web service based clients. Interprise is completely integrated with aspdotnetstorefront IS edition, so is well architected for good integartion. I think a magento/Is integration would create an ideal platform!

I plan to start developing plugins etc for this over the next few months.......